Most kayakers who have done any amount of wilderness paddling are some shade of green. I refer not to seasickness, but to environmental outlook. These green hues range from feeling vague warm fuzzies toward all things natural to engaging in radical activism. Sadly, many greens, of all stripes, come to regard loggers as implacable enemies of the earth.

Your actual working logger is not usually the one making high-level decisions such as how much—if any—old-growth we should cut or how much timber companies should pay to log public lands. Indeed, when loggers lose their jobs, it’s often because of bad decisions other people have made which led to over-logging. Yet I’ve sat around some campfires and listened to righteous greens, heavily into their cups of herbal tea, dismiss loggers as Neanderthals whose axes happen to be steel rather than stone.

The truth is that some loggers I’ve met have a knowledge of forest life-cycles comparable to that of many ecologists, and superior to that of a lot of weekend eco-warriors. Once, I even encountered some loggers who were fellow kayakers…

I’d been camped for a couple of days on a beach in the lee of a small cape that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. It’s on a wild, lonely, and lovely part of the B.C. coast; the sort of place where full-grown trees are sculpted like bonsai by the winds sweeping in off the open ocean. It’s not the sort of place you see a lot of paddlers, so it was with interest that I noticed a pair of kayaks appear around the point, plugging steadily through some pretty lively seas. My interest increased as they got closer. The boats sat so deeply in the water they resembled those frogman-guided torpedoes used in the Second World War. But, as I would soon learn, these boats were not swamped; they were simply properly loaded for Paul Bunyan camping.

The pair waved cheerfully to me as they landed. Each slipped a folding wheelset on their boat. With such heavily-laden craft, the wheels promptly dug in like skids, ploughing furrows through the wet sand. But this did not deter the strapping lads, both of whom appeared quite capable of besting John Deere himself in a tug-of-war.

With the boats above the high-tide line, one of the pair casually pulled out a shotgun and wandered down the beach to see if any waterfowl were available for plucking. The other proceeded to make camp, or rather, establish a homestead. First, he set up a large dome tent. Next, he dug in four driftwood logs around it. He then enclosed the tent in a roofed box built from five enormous blue tarps. Now, one tarp over a tent to reduce condensa- tion is not an unusual sight on the rainy and cold outer coast. But I’d never seen the full plastic-bun- galow approach before (or since). It left me wondering why he bothered with the tent.

My Canadian Rockies Whitewater guidebooks are in rough shape. The covers are delaminating, the corners are abused, a mildewed crust of dried salad dressing stains one of the spines and the desiccated corpses of mosquitoes litter the pages describing good spring runs.

Any paddler who lives along the peaks separating Alberta from British Columbia knows about these books. They are river-running bibles. Split into two volumes covering 250 river runs, the obsessively detailed descriptions have eliminated any need for local river exploration. Helpful as the books may be, they have taken the adventure of paddling new rivers and run it through a printing press 5,000 times.

“Adventure,” writes Rockies guidebook author Stuart Smith “is a quality inherent to the process [of discovery], one that loses much of its appeal when someone else tells you how to do it or ad nauseam describes how it was done before.”

Easy for him to say after detailing every riffle in every rapid in the Rockies. “To be honest,” he claims, “I dislike guidebooks!” Those 650 pages must have been painful.

Paddling around Banff usually means choosing between a handful of standard runs like the Kicking Horse, Pipestone, Upper Bow and Kananaskis. Exploration is not really a part of the paddling ethic here anymore. Few people even bother looking for new runs since the guidebooks were released in the mid-1990s. Want to try a different river? Go to the library and look one up.

Now the frontier of exploration lies on the West Coast. With so much water and so many logging roads being hacked out of the bush, new runs are routinely opened. Guess where Smith lives now?

Today’s paddlers are moved by written words on a page, and end up doing only what has already been done. But it’s hard to blame paddlers for being followers when it seems our predecessors have been everywhere. The put-ins and take-outs may change from time to time, certain features might become more popular and there may be some new wood that finds its way into a local favourite, but there’s nothing really new out there.

They will ask, “Whatcha doing this weekend?”

You will answer, “Paddling.”

Inevitably, they will reply, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go rafting.” It will pain you even though you knew it was coming, even though you’ve heard it a hundred times. There is no polite reply.

Our sport may be growing, but people—family and best friends included—still have no clue what we do. They can’t grasp the difference between a 20-foot blob of black rubber filled with pasty, poorly-dressed punters and a responsive piece of plastic paddled by a party of one. Rafting involves a paddle, a helmet and a lifejacket and is therefore whitewater in their eyes. They don’t see the cunning with which kayakers pick our way down the river. They can’t imagine the freedom of slicing through a roadless landscape or planing down the face of a glassy wave. They’ve never felt their gut lurch at the lip of a drop, the sensation of being airborne and the impact upon landing. They think rafting looks fun.

“I’ve always wanted to do kayaking, but I am so afraid of flipping over and being trapped under the water,” they will continue if you bother impressing upon them the subtle differences between the sports. (You don’t bother explaining that you don’t “do” kayaking.)

It’s hard to reply to people who say they are scared of being trapped underwater because, deep down, kayakers are afraid of being trapped underwater. So you respond, “Don’t worry, when you want to bail, you bail. It’s automatic.”

Then, just to confirm you might as well be talking to a stump, they will blather on about how they heard from a friend’s uncle’s cousin that his neighbour got trapped and almost drowned…but didn’t.

“I would be scared of dying by going over a big waterfall,” they point out.

Of course they’d be scared of dying this way. Most of us would be, but a little perspective please. 

I stumped upon a photo of Vic Van Wie and his kayak-fishing world-record 256-pound thresher shark while making some final online arrangements for my first kayak-fishing trip.

Here’s a guy in a T-shirt, surf trunks and sandals kneeling beside a 12-foot kayak and an 11-foot fish. Below the photo he recounts the catch: “The thresher shark hit about 20 minutes after I started soaking a live mackerel. He ripped off all 80 yards of mono top-shot and was into the Spectra backing within a few seconds. Even with my bait buck- et in the water [used as a sea anchor] I was still getting pulled at a pretty good clip. After about an hour and a half it turned into a standoff with him about 20–30 feet below the kayak. For another half an hour we played tug of war.”

When he finally landed the shark a kayak-fishing buddy named Rhino grabbed the leader and then “beat it upside the head” until it stopped thrashing.

I don’t even like putting a worm on my hook, let alone dragging a 256- pound shark across my kayak.

I’d committed to this article on kayak fishing and after reading about the monsters being caught off the coast of California I knew I couldn’t just spend a day filling a pail with panfry sunfish if it was going to be a good story.